Catch My Drift

Earth's major tectonic plates

Alfred Wegener liked to puzzle out problems, and one of them was how the world’s continents came to be. South America and Africa looked like two puzzle pieces that should have fit together once. Back in 1912, while our fictional Miriam Josefsohn was campaigning for woman suffrage, Wegener proposed the theory of continental drift. A hundred years later, most of us see the sense in his explanations. But when Wegener first spoke about his hypothesis, few geologists t...